Great thread, and thanks for responding and showing you are reading the forums Cryptic.

Short Term:
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-Death Penalty - This doesn't need to be severe, just something to restrict death from being a reward (ie respawn so fast with 100% hull). I think if you die, you shouldn't be allowed to re-enter combat until your teammates are done fighting. If they die too, then the mob respawns and you have to try again. That's the way video games generally work
-Higher difficulty combat wise, ground and space (if this invovles a slider, there must be a benefit for playing higher difficulty like improved loot etc.)
-Crew being a valuable resource - Crew should affect the effectiveness of your ship. Perhaps with less crew, you do less dmg, abilities are less effective ect. If you die, you lose a good portion of your crew. Then you can go to any starbase to refill your crew (perhaps paying merits, or ECs or something). Crew should then be tweaked accordingly to balance the game, (ie how much crew you lose with direct hits etc.)

Mid Term:
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-More ship interiors - and also missions to do inside your ship
-Allow plotting courses and traveling from inside your ship and
-an actual crafting system
- integrate more randomly generated content that's outside of those exploration clusters. Maybe on my way to a mission, i encounter a RANDOM distress call, or something like that.
-The in game maps are tacky. I think the maps should have a stylish interface, with somewhat treky looking controls. I think if you are going to travel, the focus should always be from your bridge (until you get into a mission instance. And replace sector space with a better interface that you can access from your bridge and see where you are going, how much time until you get there and such.
-Option to create standard uniforms that all your random crew wear (1 for Tactical, Science, Engineering)
-Random NPCs need WAAAAAY more varied looks. For such an in depth character creation program, I'm surpised to see so many clones.

Long Term:
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I don't really have anything I'd like to list right now, because I think my short term goals are the most important to me. Unfortunately, I won't be sticking around if the difficulty and death penatly aren't fixed. I just like a good challenge, and being afraid of death enhances the experience for me. If not, I guess I'll be checking in on STO in a year.

Thanks for putting this thread together. I think this is the best way for Cryptic to know what the public really wants. Just remember Cryptic, there is a LARGE population of folks not on the forums. You should think about gathering this data, and putting some of the top items on a survey and sending it out to see what the rest think too. Just a thought. This is still the free month, and I'm sure there are quite a few folks still deciding whether to keep the game or not. For me, as long as I hear you are working to fix my top items, I'll stick around even if you can't quite implement them within the free month.

Short Term:
Allow us to save multiple costumes and remove costs associated with changing costumes and names. I should not have to pay to add a pip when I rank up... for that matter, it should be added automatically when I rank up.

Ability to respecialize and reassign points.

Voice acting.

More loot available to find in areas. Most planets and systems are too sparse. More variety in the loot we recieve.

Mid Term:
I don't like playing PvP very much, but I love the Klingon faction. I want it to be just as fleshed out as the federation side in terms of PvE content. Get your people started on story ideas. I'd also like more ship choices for the Klingon side. Really, everything the federation gets, the Klingons should get too at some point.

On Ship Missions involving your crew members is pretty much required for Star Trek... which would also come with the requirement of being able to explore your own ship. Most of the episodes of star trek actually take place on the ship, so a good amount of missions should take place on your ship as well. I would also like more interaction with our bridge crew. Give them personalities so we actually get to know them.

Allow us to assign a first officer and department heads such as: Chief Medical Officer, Chief of Security, etc... with some sort of bonus from them.

Special rewards that we can display in our ready room like a trophy case. I think this would be very cool for viewing our accolades as well as other rememberings from special missions.


Long Term:
Give us something else to do that's not related to leveling, like some sort of side quests that give us another benefit. More stuff to do on time off from our ships and away missions. There should be side goals.

Other factions once the Klingon faction has been sufficiently fleshed out. My personal requests are Romulan and Borg.

Multiple time lines. I would like to beable to interact with star trek history from as early as Jonathan Archer's days all the way up through STO's present... it doens't have to affect history, but if somebody would rather play in Kirk's era, than they should be able to. Each era could be kept on a seperate server and people could cross between them as they time travel. They could than do missions related to that time frame and have to change ships and uniforms to match. This would also make the use of ships that should be obsolete much more viable, and give us a reason to utilize different costumes.

The ability to go on long distance away missions to the other quadrants, and have there be a benefit to us doing so. There should be a lot more loot to find. I want to explore the delta quadrant.

Short term:
-Enable some sort of automation for Shield reinforce settings or at the very least have your choice act for more than a few seconds (fighting Captain level entities I often find myself trying to maneuver and press powers while continuously clicking Distribute Shields as my shields drop so fast (and I usually run with my effective Shield power level at 66), fun went down significantly when balancing shields started taking up half my clicks in combat) (this is the one that will probably take mid-term time but it is my most critical problem right now so I want it short-term. )
-Remove the skill cap (the skill system as is becomes severely bent as certain types of players (and I am most definitely one of these) don't "waste" points on skills that are only useful in a specific tier or for weapons you may not end up using in the future)
-Put auto-attack back in for ground combat (and I don't remember seeing anything about whether its removal was intentional or not)
-Reduce cooldown timer on batteries (as it is now I almost only use Shield ones because if I use another one and need a shield withing 5 minutes I'm probably already dead)

Mid-Term:
-Implement a secondary advancement counter for Admirals and up so the Skill point cap removal doesn't trivialize future advancement.
-Mix up the number of objectives required in missions (5 is better than 8, but it is almost always 5!)


Long term:
-Redo Memory Alpha conceptually
-The runabouts you can buy in DS9 fascinate me but I am waiting to get one until I hear solid numbers on the number of ships we can have. I would like to see specific missions that are available if you have one that specifically use it and special PvP maps that are Runabout only.
-In-game documentation needs to be massively improved. Abilities should show you all skills that affect them and how, skills should show all abilities they affect, numbers should have some way (optional tooltipsmaybe?) that show everything that is affecting the value.

Short Term

Gloves for females

Civilian clothes/long coats

Louder, more powerful ship sounds

Mid-term

More ship customization options

The ability to have fleet only fleet action instances

More fleet actions

Long-term

More ship functionality (ability to walk around ship)

More fleet functionalities

More playable factions

Short Term:

1. Remove the skill cap (I have to say remove because I have a feeling Cryptic's idea of "significantly increase" is another 4.5 points into a skill box). I've been playing through and putting points into skills as if there weren't one because I was lead to believe we would be able to "Do anything". I mean we HAVE to spend skill points in order to get promoted and if there's a cap on top of that we will be FORCED to spend points on skills we don't need or want just to make the next one available. We've been given a lot of freedom in customizing our characters which makes some of us form a connection with them, but what's the point if I'm going to have to play the entirety of the content over and over again because I HAVE to make different characters in order to see what different ships do at maximum effectiveness. All that being said I can see some reason to it being there like a powerleveler who's maxed out everything going into a future fleet action he/she qualifies for and takes all the good loot. It's a short term solution to a short - mid-term problem. Even so, I'd still like it to disappear.

2. Fix the AI pathing issue. True this was a lot worse in beta but at current I HAVE to set a rally point on the opposite side of a doorway in order to ensure my BO's don't try endlessly to phase through the wall without realizing that they can't. Also in space I'll often get enemies flying into asteroids...and I mean inside of them and still shoot at me THROUGH THE ASTEROID. What's worse, they seem to do it intentionally.

3. Allow us to still be able to see mission rewards even after we've accepted the mission. This is especially important since the xp reward decreases as you get higher in level. I still have a LT6 mission to do and I'm Cmd1. Why? because the mission was broken at the time and I was too busy doing the exploration missions over and over to try and get some decent equipment and components.

Mid Term:

1. Ship interiors in addition to the bridge. Specifically for me: Shuttlebay (I mentioned this one because you guys already have a design for it and the deck it's on too), Engineering, Ten Forward (you also have a design for this), Transporter Room, Captain's Ready Room, Sick Bay. All are places to add content....even the bridge. I know why it's not in yet. You guys love giving us customization options and so I'm willing to be you would want to allow us to customize these interiors we keep asking for. I have faith in you guys for this one.

2. Usage of the Transwarp network for places other than Sol System.

3. More content and content variety. I mean your content comes in 3 forms: Killing, Scanning, or Talking. Your episodes are a combination of the 3. Your "Exploration missions" are either pure combat, pure scanning, pure talking, or combat and one of the other 2. In the case where combat is combined with the talking portion, it's only to attempt to add a story element to the constant killing. In getting to Commander I've only see 2 diplomatic missions. 1 at Lt. and 1 at LtCmd.

Long Term:

1. I'd love to see you guys try to do something groundbreaking. I mean Bioware is making a FULLY VOICED MMO!!! While I don't expect you guys to do that, I would like to see you try to set a new standard in the MMO industry and make the game feel less like you made it with a "That'll do" attitude. I understand you may not actually feel that way and there may be other circumstances but your customers and anyone else rating the game have to judge it on what is in front of us and not on speculations of what you "might" want to do. You did do this in terms of customization but really...tell me...should the most fun a person has in a game be making their character??

2. Please add Explorable Planets, Systems, Sectors. I mean in the Exploration missions, whenever I come across a combat situation Starfleet seems to already know about the danger. Am I really exploring these clusters or just patroling previously explored ones?

3. Please add Playable Romulan/Reman, Cardassian, and Ferengi (for trading) factions with PvE and PvP content as well as more PvE content for the Klingon faction.

I'd like to see special abilities for each of the 3 ships... something not replicated by bridge officers.


For example, Cruisers get an AE ability that forces enemy ships to attack them for 10 seconds.

Escorts get the ability to extend their inertial dampeners to everyone in their team to increase mobility.

Science class ships get the ability to open a transwarp conduit that their team can use to travel to different sectors.

Not really having much invested in this so far.. I can only offer a few things. I read about 6/11 pages of posts so if anything is repeated i apologize.

Short term:
Auto fire phasers in space (it wasnt fun repeatedly clicking or tapping a button in CoH/V, its still not fun now)

Auto fire basic phaser blasts on ground (See above parenthesis)

First person perspective in both ground and space. Seriously.. Why is there no First person perspective in ground. This is a very stupid trend in MMOs to now give up on the FPP.. when it takes about an hours worth of coding.. if that. Space might be less important due to the nature of the combat system.. But still. There is simply no good reason to not give the option when it would take so little effort to add in. Not saying it should be the default.. but there is absolutely no reason short of laziness to not give the option.


Now i dont have alot to add here, so i will combine mid term and long term

More interstellar diplomacy! - I had to laugh when a friend of mine who is a die hard star wars fan, and I tend to perfer the trek franchise, have gotten excited over their respective h2h MMOs. Its a weird concept because the trek franchise is one that is built more on dialouge, drama and insight, yet the MMO is more action oriented. While the Wars franchise is more about straight ahead action, yet its MMO is going to be HEAVILY dialogue and narrative based. Youve got a year long jump on TOR.. and if you want this game to survive TORs release, you better invest in more dialogue/ lore centric content to keep up with what they will be putting out, unless you want to leave STO as the Trek equivilent to star wars galaxies.

Cut scenes Again this is tied into the last one. But you need more cinematic content than warping in and out of zones and having a box with a talking head telling you what to do as content. Saving cut scenes for segments in stages of episode missions (as episodes being the primary story arc) will give the endearing quality to this game that it needs if it is going to remain viable, If you dont add these two.. then in the history of things, STO will be viewed as just another game of the WoW era, thus making it an MMO outside of its own generation. This IS where MMOs are going like it or not. Really this is not that hard to add. Simply adding a trigger command into quests that /execute FMV 0192945 for its corresponding quest is not hard to implement. The hard part is just writing mechanima, which with a full studio of employees, is really not that hard.

Content The game needs more, the game also needs more varied content styles. the "plots" to quests are as predictable as 80s cartoons, if not more so. By making your content predictable and repetitive it diminshes interest from the narrative of the game.. Which in MMOs where the combat system quickly becomes repetitive.. the story is what should be giving players the reason WHY you wanna escort the same medical ship you have a thousand times before. or why you want to fend off your 10,000 horde of BoPs. Leaving the reason to do missions for the gear/stat/money reward is the last generation of MMOS, and not fit for what the next generation of MMOs will be.
Even though the story arcs and overlying themes of the tv series are reused over and over again.. there is sincerely enough variance and underlying significance to keep people interested. Power struggles, Religious conflicts, deceipt, treachery, social norms, a changing society, are all hallmarks of the lore of Trek. You have a wealth of lore to work from.. actually use some of it Please

short term- a skill to allow engineers to drop turrets in space
get the area control PvP counters to work, it's always 0/0

med term- PvP environments with defenses or defensed positions to stop "fly-by" capture. Someone has to spend a least 30 to 45 seconds knocking out turrets to capture the position and for every 30 seconds the position is held the area generates turrets for that faction. It will encourage players to actually stay and hold the position. It will bring out different tactical aspect of the game.

long term- an Realm vs. Realm combat PvP sector of space that resets every 2 or 3 weeks. A combination ground and space combat. Ground combat captures the system and space combat controls the area around the system. Control of total systems determine the RvR winner over a 2 or 3 week period. Give badges of victory or something for turn-ins.

Short Term:
- Respecs
- Respecs
- Game Documentation (ships, weapons, SKILLS)

(PS - did I mention respecs?)

Mid Term:
- More group oriented missions
- PvP Balance
- Ship Balance/Role definitions
- Skill/Item revamp (Paying 4500 points for polaron skill ups while phasers are 900 and both do the same DPS and the skill doesn't seem to affect the secondary effects is silly with a skill cap.)
- Additional ship and costume pieces.

Short term:

Fix the lack of mirror universe uniforms for Female Characters, lack of TOS Skirts
Make it so I can give my BOs these uniforms.

Mid term:

More ship models! Maybe how we have Advanced and Fleet Escorts, get more of that sort of thing for each tier.
More Klingon PvE missions

Long Term:

Cardassian, Romulan Factions.